N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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With apologies, I'd like to repost this from a response to Gaulin over in the Gaulin thread, where he admired the video about Weikert's nonsense:
[quote]Largely bullshit. Weikert's stuff is highly controversial and not well regarded, outside the world of anti-evolution christian fundamentalists, who spend a huge amount of effort trying to drag religion out of its culpability for its contributions to Hitler and shift the blame to Darwin:
Priests saluting Hitler: http://www.nobeliefs.com/images.....ute.jpg
Carving of church decoration showing a Nazi stormtrooper standing next to Jesus: http://www.nobeliefs.com/memento....MC2.jpg
Carving of Hitler on a baptismal font: http://www.nobeliefs.com/memento....MC5.jpg
Et cetera: http://www.nobeliefs.com/memento....oes.htm
Guess who banned some evolutionary books? - Hitler. The 1935 edition of the Die Bücherei listed banned books including "Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism".
Guess who said, "Where do we acquire the right to believe that man has not always been what he is now? The study of nature teaches us that, in the animal kingdom just as much as in the vegetable kingdom, variations have occurred. They've occurred within the species, but none of these variations has an importance comparable with that which separates man from the monkey — assuming that this transformation really took place." (Hitler, again.)
Hitler created a pathological nation. He pulled together all manner of stuff with varying degrees of distortion in order to justify his actions. He exploited some social Darwinist phrasings (for which we can blame Herbert Spencer far more than Darwin) for his purposes, just as he used (and perverted) a lot of religious stuff. In fact, he relied on distortions of standard religion far more than Darwinism. The Germans marched to war with "Gott mit uns" on their belt. Hitler intended to present himself as a new messiah who would save the world from Jews: "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord..""
About Weikert's work:
| Quote | | Robert J. Richards: 'it can only be a tendentious and dogmatically driven assessment that would condemn Darwin for the crimes of the Nazis'." Does Science Education Need the History of Science. Isis. 2008, 99: 322–330. |
| Quote | | [from Wikipedia] His third book, From Darwin to Hitler, has been widely criticized by the academic community and promoted by creationists. His fourth is a sequel, Hitler's Ethic, arguing that Adolf Hitler's "ideology revolved around evolutionary ethics -- the idea that whatever promoted evolutionary progress is good and whatever hinders it is bad."[13][14] According to Weikart, "This evolutionary ethic shaped nearly every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare and racial extermination."[15] Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, a historian at Davidson College, reviewed the book for Central European History noting Weikart "pushes his interpretations too far" because Weikart "does not sufficiently integrate the complex motivational factors" behind ideology, with Kaplan concluding Hitler's Ethic "offers little in terms of a new, fully convincing understanding of the Nazi dictator's thought."[16] Gerwin Strobl, a historian at University of Cardiff, reviewed Hitler's Ethic in European History Quarterly, writing the introduction "reads like a mixture of a television voiceover and the worst kind of undergraduate essay" and described the book has two notable weaknesses: "how ‘Hitler’s ethics’ were disseminated within the party" and its "emphasis on intellectual developments inside Germany," which ignores "that Hitler had set out to copy what he regarded as the Anglo-American example."[17] Eric Kurlander, in German Studies Review, wrote: "Though energetically drawn, this new iteration of the "intentionalist" argument invites skepticism in some respects, especially in its attempt to explain World War II and the Holocaust."[18] Additionally, Larry Arnhart, a professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University wrote "As Weikart indicates, Hitler was a crude genetic determinist who believed that not only physical traits but even morality and culture were inherited genetically along racial lines, so that moral and cultural evolution depended on genetic evolution. But Weikart doesn't indicate to his readers that Darwin denied this."[19] |
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